Primer: America First, Not Senate First
Synopsis
In November 2024, the American people ushered in an America First governing majority to the White House, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. Americans did so in response to an explicit promise to secure the border, fix a broken immigration legal system, restore integrity in elections, and dismantle the woke and weaponized bureaucracy that has governed without their consent. That was a mandate, not a suggestion.
And yet, more than a year into this majority coalition, the American people’s priorities have, by and large, not been sufficiently enacted into law (the One Big Beautiful Bill notwithstanding), let alone implemented. These priorities sit largely unaddressed, not because there aren’t enough votes to pass them but because the Senate has chosen to stop itself from legislating via its own institutional—not constitutional—rules. The obstacle in the Senate is a leadership that prioritizes the institution’s comfort over the country’s urgency and the citizens it serves. The Senate has become, in a phrase, Senate First rather than America First.
This brief identifies and describes four self-imposed procedural Senate shackles and calls for their reform or removal.
1. The Legislative Filibuster: Either fully restore the genuine, physically demanding, standing talking filibuster or abolish the legislative filibuster outright. The current standard of a painless, performative filibuster in the modern Senate allows a minority of senators to stall all legislation, including nation-saving legislation, from passing the Senate.
2. The Blue Slips: End the custom that gives control and veto power of a single senator over the executive branch’s U.S. Attorneys, Marshals, and district judges from being appointed in that senator’s home state. Why does a single senator get to dictate whom the president can appoint? This is a constitutionally offensive practice.
3. Recess Appointments: Allow the president to resume the constitutional practice of recess appointments during Senate recess periods by stopping the use of pro forma sessions. The current Senate majority should take a genuine August recess and allow the president to make the necessary recess appointments to ensure that the executive branch functions at full capacity. Republicans should not take overt steps to hinder the ability of a Republican president to put in place his team.
4. The Parliamentarian: Recognize the unelected position of the Senate parliamentarian as a strictly advisory role. The parliamentarian gives nonbinding guidance to senators, which can be overruled by a majority of senators. Because the Parliamentarian is not an elected position, she serves at the pleasure of the Senate majority leader and can be hired or fired by the leader.1
The cost of the Senate’s inaction is measured in the legislation now stalled by these procedural norms: the SAVE America Act (H.R. 7296/S. 3752) to secure our elections, the H.R. 2 framework to secure our border, and the full funding of the Department of Homeland Security. Adherence to these procedural norms that are no longer fit for use has stalled these critical pieces of legislation in the Senate. Even worse, the current Senate majority’s devotion to these Senate practices will not be returned by the current party out of power when it regains the majority. It has already proven as much.2 A movement that disarms itself in the name of decorum will not be rewarded for its manners; it will be governed by those who kept their weapons. America cannot fight for its future with one arm tied behind its back.
Background: The Mandate and the Machinery
Establishing the Rules
In Article I of the U.S. Constitution, the framers established Congress as the bicameral body in which was vested the sole legislative authority to make and amend federal laws in the United States.3 While Article I of the Constitution lays out the structure, powers, and duties of Congress, it does not prescribe how each house of Congress shall conduct the business of considering and passing legislation, save for the exceptions explicitly named where Congress must produce a supermajority for treaties, impeachments, and constitutional amendments.4 Instead, in Article I, Section 5, Clause 2, the Constitution says that “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”5
The importance of allowing Congress to regulate and determine the rules of its proceedings and the right to alter them are acknowledged by both contemporaneous sources from the country’s founding and modern ones. In his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Justice Joseph Story describes how each house of Congress must be allowed to determine the rules of its own proceedings because it would be impossible to anticipate and lay out in the Constitution every procedural rule that might come up in the future.6 In United States v. Ballin (1892), a case that affirmed Congress’s constitutional authority to establish its own procedural rules, the Supreme Court ruled not only that Congress has the right to establish its own rules but also that “the power to make rules is not one which once exercised is exhausted. It is a continuous power, always subject to be exercised by the house.”7 Additionally, the Senate today acknowledges that the rules of the Senate have been revised over time and lists the progression of rule changes.8
Broken Rules: The Modern Senate
The right of Congress to determine and alter its own rules of procedure is acknowledged at the beginning of every new Congress when a new legislative body is sworn into office and each house must vote to adopt its own rules. This vote implies that following each election that results in a new Congress, newly sworn-in members adopt the rules by which they intend to enact the legislative agenda that sent them to Congress. This in turn means that when elections are held, they are supposed to result in legislative changes. If the rules by which members of Congress legislate are ineffective in allowing them to do so, the proper response is for Congress to establish rules of procedure that allow it to effectively legislate. When the American people send a message as clear as the one delivered in 2024, the institutions and officials of government are obligated to translate that call into action.
While the Senate is an elected legislative body, it was designed to be a deliberative body—a place of sober debate and evaluation. More specifically, the Senate was designed as a body to temper the intense passions of the House of Representatives. George Washington reportedly said to Thomas Jefferson, “We pour our legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.9” However, deliberative and sober action does not mean zero action. The Senate was never designed to be a proverbial graveyard in which the considered will of a national majority goes to die at the hands of its own managers.
And yet that is precisely what has happened in the modern-day Senate. Under the current leadership of Majority Leader John Thune and a self-styled moderate group of senators, the Senate has perfected the art of motion without movement.10 Votes are occasionally scheduled and quietly allowed to fail: Voting as performance instead of the constitutional action of legislating has become the norm. In early 2025, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (S. 6), a bill to protect and care for children born after a failed abortion, was brought up for a vote in the Senate. Instead of requiring those in opposition to the bill to stand and explain their opposition, the Senate Republican majority simply scheduled a cloture vote that allowed the minority opposition to kill the bill and invoke the silent filibuster.11 The idea that the Senate is “the world’s greatest deliberative body” as it currently functions is a fiction.
Reforms to this state of affairs are declared impossible before they are even attempted. Every demand for action is met with the same liturgy of procedural impossibility: The votes are not there; the precedent is dangerous; the institution must be protected. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, former Senate Republican leader, has often spoken against making alterations to the legislative filibuster.12 Thune has also vowed to preserve the filibuster.13 The effect of inaction in this area—whether intended or not—is to run out the clock on the agenda the American people voted to enact.
It is important to be precise about what is and is not at stake here. None of the reforms urged below requires the Senate to abandon deliberation, ignore the minority, or trample on the Constitution. Every one of them concerns a norm—an unwritten custom or a self-imposed rule of recent vintage—that the Senate invented and the Senate can therefore change. The defenders of the status quo may dress these customs in the robes of constitutional necessity, but they are nothing of the kind. They are habits, even long-standing ones. And habits that prevent a free people from governing themselves are not sacred; they are obstacles.
The question before the Senate is not whether it will respect the Constitution. It is whether it will respect the voters—the “People” from whom their constitutional powers derive. So far, it has chosen its own convenience over both.
The Filibuster: Fight It Honestly or End It
Arguably the most consequential procedural shackle of all is the current iteration of the filibuster. The modern legislative filibuster or cloture rule is found in Senate Standing Rule XXII. It requires two-thirds of senators (sixty) to invoke cloture, or agree to end debate, on a piece of legislation before the body even gets to vote on the passage of a measure.14 The filibuster is routinely defended as a venerable and long-standing pillar of the United States’ constitutional order. But the legislative filibuster, or cloture rule, is no such thing. The filibuster is not named in the Constitution but is a result of the Senate establishing its own rules by which it conducts its own proceedings.15 There is no constitutional requirement for the Senate’s legislative filibuster.
Furthermore, the cloture rule is not prescribed in the Constitution but is rather a product of the early twentieth century, when not only the nation’s politics but also the institutions of government changed. The progressive political movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized by expanding the use of direct democracy and resulted in the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, which allowed for the direct election of senators from each state.16 The direct election of senators fundamentally changed the nature of the Senate: It no longer insulated senators from the political passions of the day and made the body less deliberative and more reactionary. The first iteration of the cloture rule was not adopted until 1917.17 During a legislative fight to pass a bill that would arm merchant ships during World War I, a group of intransigent senators who opposed the bill ran out the clock by engaging in extended debate—a filibuster.18 Following this particular filibuster, a group of senators believed that reform was needed to better facilitate the passage of legislation by creating a mechanism of ending debate via a vote—cloture.
The creation of cloture required any senator in opposition to a measure to stand, talk, and oppose it for as long as he was physically able. This talking filibuster requires a minority of senators, as few as one, to outlast the will of the majority until one side gives up or a compromise is reached.
The threshold for cloture and to avoid a filibuster was not lowered to its modern form of needing sixty votes until 1975.19 That decade was when the modern procedural tactic of employing the silent filibuster—the device that allows a minority of senators to block legislation without uttering a single word on the Senate floor—came about. What is sold as an ancient tradition is in fact a modern convenience, and a corrosive one.
Consider what the silent filibuster does to the nature of the Senate, which is designed to be a body in which robust debate takes place on a daily basis. In the nineteenth century, one had to earn the right to stop a piece of legislation. A senator or a minority group of senators had to hold the floor, to speak through the night, to physically exhaust oneself in full public view, and to pay the political price for paralyzing the chamber. The idea was that if a minority of senators believed so strongly that a bill or other measure was so bad or wrong for the country that they needed to stop it, they would need to pay the price physically, mentally, and politically. Another more modern example is the process that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which Democrat senators opposing the legislation filibustered for sixty days. Those senators had to stand and speak continuously while the Senate was in session. The modern silent filibuster eliminates the price of obstruction and makes routine opposition free of any charge. Currently, a senator needs only to signal an objection with a simple up or down vote, and the bill is dead—no stamina, no spectacle, and no accountability required. The cost of obstruction has been removed.
This is why the posture of today’s Senate leadership is indefensible. Presented with legislation that addresses issues over which the American people have expressed concern for decades and on which they demand action, the majority leader has repeatedly said that he can neither muster the votes to invoke cloture and set aside the filibuster nor sustain a talking filibuster if one were attempted, and so, he concludes, there is nothing to be done.20 But this is a false choice dressed up as reverence and deep respect for history, tradition, and norms. There are not two options here; there are three. The Senate may (1) abolish the legislative filibuster and govern by simple majority, as it has already done for executive and judicial nominations; (2) restore the genuine, physically demanding talking filibuster and force the minority to obstruct in the open, where the country can watch; or (3) keep the present arrangement, in which the minority blocks the majority at no cost and the majority simply shrugs. Leadership has chosen option three—the only option that guarantees the people’s agenda dies quietly without a fight.
To insist on preserving a painless veto for the minority while simultaneously refusing to make that minority work for it is to hand the opposition the best of both worlds and the country the worst. If the filibuster is truly the great deliberative safeguard its defenders claim, then let it deliberate—out loud, on the floor, for as long as the minority can physically stand. And if Senate leadership will not even demand that, then the honest course is to admit that the filibuster has become a mere instrument of obstruction and remove it. As we have seen recently, the talking filibuster will not be honestly advanced, which means that removing the filibuster fully is itself the only real remedy.
Recommendations
1. The Senate should modify Standing Rule XXII to require senators who wish to block cloture on a measure to solely use the talking filibuster when doing so. Debate would end only if a minority of senators can no longer sustain it.
2. If Senate leadership will not restore the true talking filibuster, it should move to eliminate the legislative filibuster, thereby subjecting bills to a simple-majority vote threshold to invoke cloture. What cannot be defended is the status quo, in which the people’s business is shelved behind a norm no one is willing to either honor or abolish.
End the Blue-Slip Veto
If the legislative filibuster allows a minority party to stall the Senate, the blue-slip practice allows a single minority senator to stall the entire executive branch.
The Appointments Clause vests the nomination power in the president, with the Senate given authority to provide or withhold consent by open vote.21 When it comes to the consideration and confirmation of judicial nominations through the Senate, including U.S. Attorneys, U.S. Marshals, and district judges, the Constitution does not outline a subsenatorial committee veto exercised by one or two home-state senators at the committee gatekeeping stage.22 However, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s blue-slip practice does just that.
The blue-slip process, as explained by the Congressional Research Service, is an internal practice of the Senate Judiciary Committee that began in 1917, under which the chairman sends blue-colored forms to home-state senators asking their views about a president’s nominee for a circuit or district judgeship and certain other positions, such as U.S. Attorneys and Marshals.23 The practice is an unwritten courtesy of the Judiciary Committee by which the chairman declines to advance a nominee—a U.S. Attorney, a U.S. Marshal, or a district judge—unless both home-state senators return a slip of paper signaling their consent.
Originally envisioned as a way to ensure nominees for U.S. Attorneys, U.S. Marshals, and district judgeships were qualified by asking those senators familiar with them due to geographical proximity; it has mutated into an absurd practice in which every senator from the opposition party has a personal, unaccountable veto over the president’s law enforcement appointments in each senator’s respective home state.
The corrosive practice of blue slips has left key law enforcement positions unfilled in critical regions of the country. In April 2025, the Senate minority leader from New York, Senator Chuck Schumer, formally refused to return blue slips for the president’s nominees to lead two of the most consequential federal prosecutors’ offices in the nation: the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.24 The chairman of the Judiciary Committee announced that he would honor the obstruction.25 By late 2025, the president had publicly identified a slate of qualified U.S. Attorney nominees who could not be confirmed for no reason other than that a lone Democrat senator had withheld his assent under the blue-slip process. The president was right to call the custom outdated and to threaten to challenge it in court.26
Defenders of the blue-slip practice call it a guarantor of home-state input and that argue that it is rooted in the constitutional senatorial prerogative of “advice and consent.”27 Iowa Senator and current Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has said that “the blue slip is meant to solicit insights into nominees and ensure that the White House is adequately consulting with home-state senators.”28 But rather than protecting these constitutional prerogatives, the custom actually protects a senator’s influence over the president’s constitutional authority to faithfully carry out his duty to enforce the law, and, by extension, the power of the American people who elected the president to enforce the law.
A U.S. Attorney is not an office of the Senate, an Article I creation. He or she is an officer of the executive branch, charged with enforcing federal law on behalf of the president of the United States, an Article II creation. The notion that a single senator from the opposite party should wield a silent veto over who prosecutes federal crimes in a major American city is not a venerable safeguard but rather a usurpation and an upending of the constitutional order.
This practice of blue slips is one that the Senate should reform or outright abolish. Reform of this practice is not unprecedented. In 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee narrowed blue-slip deference for circuit-court nominees, recognizing that no single senator should command a veto over offices of such national consequence.29 The same logic applies even more to U.S. Attorneys and Marshals, who answer to the executive branch and who serve at the president’s pleasure. To extend a home-state veto to such officers is to confuse the Senate’s role of “advice and consent” with a role of command and control that the Constitution does not grant.
Recommendation
3. The Judiciary Committee should end the practice of blue slips for executive branch nominees, which includes U.S. Attorneys and U.S. Marshals, and should restore the historical understanding that a returned blue slip reflects consultation, not consent. The Judiciary Committee Chairman should advance qualified nominees through the committee and to the Senate floor regardless of a home-state senator’s refusal to return a slip. A century-old gentlemen’s agreement that was neither made law nor codified in the Senate’s Standing Rules cannot be permitted to override the president’s constitutional appointment power. “Advice and consent” is honored through a majority vote on the Senate floor.
Recess, and Let the President Govern
In the Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution, the president is given the power to fill vacancies that arise when the Senate is in recess.30 This power is a deliberate feature of the Constitution’s design, intended to ensure that the government can be staffed and function even when the Senate is not in session. For most of American history, this power was used freely and uncontroversially. In 2012, President Barack Obama tried to appoint executive branch officers when the Republican-controlled Senate had not declared itself in recess.31 What resulted was a Supreme Court decision in NLRB v. Noel Canning that affirmed that while, yes, the president had the constitutional authority to appoint officials when the Senate was in recess, it was the Senate that determined when it was and was not in recess.32
What emerged from this disagreement and the subsequent Supreme Court case is a bizarre practice in which the Senate never goes into recess during a session of Congress, thereby blocking presidents from making recess appointments. The Senate does this by holding pro forma sessions in which the Senate gavels in for a few seconds every three days, with no business having occurred.
Blocking presidents from making recess appointments when the Senate majority is from the opposite party may make sense if the Senate majority wants to conduct stricter oversight of the executive branch and its personnel. In fact, the pro forma tactic was pioneered by Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2007 to frustrate a Republican president.33 Senators understandably do not want to grant a president of the opposite party recess appointments without properly vetting the nominees.
The current paradigm, however, is that the Senate majority is blocking the president’s recess appointments despite being members of the same party. Since President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, the Republican Senate majority has used unanimous consent agreements to schedule pro forma sessions at least every three days when senators are not in town in order to prevent the president from making recess appointments.34 35 Republican senators are blocking the Republican president from staffing the executive branch with enough people to carry out his duties and agenda.
This state of affairs should trouble every American who voted for unified control of government during the 2024 election. Currently, the president’s nominees languish by the dozen on the Senate’s executive calendar, awaiting a vote. The president does not have his personnel in place to execute the law and deliver the policy agenda that the American people voted to implement. Right now, a Republican-controlled Senate is obstructing the Republican administration from doing its job by distorting the Constitution’s “advice and consent” role into one in which senators veto the president’s power to effectively govern—a destructive expression of the radical Senate First mindset.
There is no institutional principle that requires this practice, and it is not a long-standing tradition. A Senate that wished to let the president govern could simply take a real recess, longer than ten days, during the upcoming August district work period, as the Senate has done for centuries. Should leadership refuse to do that, the Constitution supplies a remedy of last resort: Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, when the House and Senate disagree on the time of adjournment, the president may adjourn Congress himself, opening the door to recess appointments. However, this remedy should not be necessary. The Senate should simply do its job and provide opportunities on the floor or through recess appointments to confirm the president’s team in a timely fashion, or else get out of the way. If a President cannot appoint his team within a year or two, and certainly within a full term, because of Senate norms, then the Senate itself is failing, and the rules and processes under which it operates are failing. The Senate must change its processes if it desires for the Constitution to function properly.
Recommendation
4. The Senate should take a genuine August recess of more than ten days so that the president may exercise his constitutional recess appointment power and staff his administration. Senate leadership should immediately cease the practice of scheduling pro forma sessions for the purpose of obstructing a president of their own party. If leadership refuses to send the Senate into a recess, Speaker Mike Johnson, with the House and the president, should be prepared to use the adjournment clause of Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to break the logjam of nominees.
The Parliamentarian Advises—She Does Not Rule
The fourth procedural shackle of the Senate is the most peculiar of all because it is not even a rule or Senate precedent; rather, it is a person. The position of the Senate parliamentarian is an unelected staff officer whose function is to advise the presiding officer on the chamber’s rules and precedents. She holds no constitutional office; she is not an elected official. She works for the majority leader and serves at his pleasure. The current parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, was hired in February 2012 by Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid during the Obama administration.36
To put it plainly, because the Senate’s so-called institutional defenders deliberately obscure the fact: The parliamentarian does not rule. She does not have the power to strike provisions from bills or rule an amendment out of order; only elected senators can do those things. The parliamentarian offers advice, and the presiding officer—the vice president of the United States in his capacity as president of the Senate or another senator presiding—makes the ruling. The Senate may, by simple majority vote, decline to follow that advice. The language that often describes the parliamentarian as having “struck down” this or that provision is not just imprecise; it is plainly wrong, and that misguided view has allowed the perpetuation of a fiction that the parliamentarian’s advice is binding on senators as they legislate.
It should also be noted that the current parliamentarian’s advice has been, to put it charitably, inconsistent. The clearest illustration concerns her ruling that Republican-led attempts to repeal certain green energy policies of the Inflation Reduction Act—the left’s signature climate-spending law, which passed under budget reconciliation—could not be repealed using reconciliation just three years later.37 These green energy programs were created through the budget reconciliation process by Democrats, with the parliamentarian’s blessing. Yet when a Republican majority sought to repeal some of those same provisions using the same budget reconciliation process, the parliamentarian advised that the repeal effort violated the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which governs what is and isn’t allowed under budget reconciliation. According to the current parliamentarian, what fifty-one senators may build, fifty-one senators may not dismantle. A ratchet that turns only to the political left is not a neutral rule of procedure. It is a thumb on the scale.
Nor was this an isolated instance of inconsistent parliamentary advice. During the same reconciliation fight to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill, the parliamentarian advised against provisions that would have barred federal Medicaid dollars from flowing to those whose immigration status could not be verified, prompting members of the Republican majority to question, with justification, whether the office was applying the rules or applying an ideology.38 When an unelected advisor’s guidance bends reliably in one direction, deference to that guidance ceases to be respect for the rules and becomes surrender to a partisan referee.
The remedy to this problem is neither radical nor unprecedented. First, the presiding officer should treat the parliamentarian’s guidance as exactly what the rules say it is: advice. Where that advice is inconsistent or indefensible, the presiding officer should decline to follow it and let the elected Senate majority’s judgment carry the day. Second, because the Senate majority leader retains the authority to replace a parliamentarian whose performance no longer commands confidence, he should remove her, as has been done in the past. In 2001, Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott removed the parliamentarian over disputes concerning the budget reconciliation rules.39 In 1987, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, for whom the Byrd Rule is named, removed the parliamentarian as soon as the Democrats took control of the Senate.40
Recommendation
5. The Republican Senate majority should instruct the presiding officer in the Senate to treat the parliamentarian’s guidance as truly advisory, not binding, and should be prepared to overrule advice that is inconsistent or contrary to the plain text of the rules and precedents. Should the current parliamentarian’s advisory rulings demonstrate a persistent partisan asymmetry like those listed above, the majority leader should exercise his authority to install a different parliamentarian who will apply the rules evenhandedly.
Policy Assessment: The Cost of Continued Inaction
In the past, it may have been said that both parties had different ideas about how to solve the same problems. In such circumstances, the U.S. Senate could function with genial procedural customs and traditions because all involved shared a gentlemanly understanding that while disagreements would arise, the people’s business must move forward. However longingly today’s senators may look back on that vanished era, it must be acknowledged that this state of affairs no longer exists, as shown by the stalemate in the current Senate.
The reforms proposed above are not sweeping changes that ignore the constitutional foundations of our government but rather alterations to procedural processes that better reflect the constitutional prerogatives of the day: namely, enacting policies aligned with the will of the people that will preserve the republic. Procedure for procedure’s sake cannot be the goal. Procedure is but the channel through which the nation either governs itself or fails to do so. Shackling the Senate through adherence to archaic procedures does not serve the American people and fails to deliver for them.
Below are just some recent examples of legislation that addresses long-standing concerns and priorities of a majority of Americans but which have been stalled in the Senate:
- The SAVE America Act: The vast majority of the American people support legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.41 A bill that includes this provision, the SAVE America Act (H.R. 7296/S. 3752), has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate for one reason: the sixty-vote cloture threshold. Leadership has declared the votes insufficient either to set aside the silent filibuster or to force the minority to defend its obstruction in the open via a talking filibuster. So the American people must continue to wait, held hostage to a procedural norm, as the integrity of their elections remains uncertain. There is no more basic prerequisite to self-government than the assurance that those casting ballots are entitled to cast them. That this act cannot pass the Senate, even when an overwhelming majority of the citizenry supports it, is untenable. The SAVE America Act is not being stalled because of glaring constitutional concerns about or principled objections to the bill. The party in charge of the Senate cannot pass this bill solely because it has tied its own hands by adhering to outdated procedures and self-imposed constraints.
- The H.R. 2 Border Framework: The Secure the Border Act is the most serious border-enforcement architecture proposed in a generation. It proposes to resume border wall construction, end catch-and-release, and reform a broken asylum system. This bill passed the House in 2023 but was stalled in the Senate without so much as a floor vote due to the Senate’s procedural obstacles. Only fragments of the bill’s enforcement proposals were salvaged and narrowly smuggled into law through reconciliation.42 The comprehensive framework the House passed remains unenacted as standing law not because a majority opposes it but because the Senate’s rules permit a minority to ensure it is never even debated.
- Full Funding for the Department of Homeland Security: A nation that will not reliably fund the agencies charged with defending its borders, enforcing its immigration laws, and protecting its citizens from foreign actors is not serious about its own sovereignty. Yet the Department of Homeland Security’s funding is perennially held captive to the same procedural brinkmanship. It is threatened, delayed, and traded away in the appropriations process because the sixty-vote cloture rule allows the silent filibuster to ensure that a determined minority can hold the homeland’s security budget for ransom. Securing the border is not a onetime act of legislation; it is a standing commitment that requires the Senate to do the basic work of governing, on time and in full.
Assessment: Future Majorities Will Not Return the Favor
The defenders of Senate First counsel restraint today as an investment in protection tomorrow. Those senators who object to any alternatives to procedural shackles that force the Senate into perpetual inaction ignore one vital truth: The political opposition does not share their reverence for these norms and traditions and will discard them at the earliest opportunity once back in the majority. The record reflects this reality.
When the left has wanted to change the rules, it has changed them. In 2013, a Democrat majority abolished the sixty-vote threshold for executive and judicial nominations the moment that threshold inconvenienced it.43 In 2022, Democrats came within two senators of abolishing the legislative filibuster entirely, and they seem likely to abolish it when they are next in the majority.44 The blue slip, the pro forma session, the deference to a friendly parliamentarian—each of these is honored by the political left exactly as long as it serves the left and discarded the instant it does not. As such, it is a safe prediction that the left will easily cast aside these time-honored procedures and traditions once they are no longer useful to its goals.
Despite this pattern of behavior that proves the left does not and will not constrain itself to existing norms and traditions, there remains the objection that animates every defense of the status quo: If we discard these norms, will we not regret it when we are again in the minority? Those who subscribe to such thinking may believe that clinging to these customs today will result in preserving for tomorrow. It is a comforting theory, but it is completely repudiated by history.
This is the conceit at the heart of Senate First thinking: that a movement can win the argument, win the election, win the majority, and then decline to govern in the hope that its forbearance will be remembered and reciprocated. History shows that it will not be. The opposition has repeatedly told and shown, without reservation, that it intends to use every lever available the next time it holds power. To preserve weapons one refuses to use on behalf of an opponent who has promised to use them against you is not a principle. It is a preemptive surrender.
Conclusion
The United States Senate is not the property of the senators who happen to occupy it. It is an instrument of self-government, held in trust for the American people, and its rules exist to serve those people, not to insulate a select club from the consequences of an election. When the customs of the chamber begin to frustrate the very purpose for which the chamber exists, the customs must yield. The customs are not in the Constitution; they are not even law. These customs are habits adopted to assist the Senate with its constitutionally prescribed role—to legislate. When these customs start to work against this role, they must be altered to better assist the Senate in doing its job.
The reforms set out in this brief ask nothing that would violate the Constitution. They ask the Senate to make obstruction honest rather than free, to stop letting a single senator veto the president’s prosecutors, to allow the president the opportunity to staff his own administration, and to treat an unelected advisor as just that: an advisor. None of these reforms dismantles deliberation, and some may, in fact, increase genuine deliberation among the senators. All of them help restore the proper constitutional framework and accountability to the voters, who are the only constituency to which the Senate ultimately answers.
The American people did not send a governing majority to Washington to protect procedures over the people and their constitutional rights. They sent it to secure the border, protect the ballot, fund the homeland’s defense, and execute the elected president’s agenda. A Senate that hides behind its own procedures while that work goes undone has chosen itself over the nation. That choice can be unmade, and it must be. The Senate was designed as a body to preserve and protect the republic. Unfortunately, the Senate now hides behind bureaucracy and processes of its own creation as excuses to not preserve our country. A Senate First mentality that obstructs an America First agenda is a byproduct of a broken institution inhabited by individuals resistant to taking the steps necessary to save the country.
Endnotes
1. U.S. Senate. About the Secretary of the Senate: Offices of the Secretary. https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/secretary-of-the-senate/offices-of-the-secretary.htm
2. Touchberry, R. ( 2026, June 1). “Retiring Senate Democrats Open Door to Anti-Filibuster Successors,” Washington Examiner. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/4587558/retiring-senate-democrats-open-door-to-anti-filibuster-successors/
3. Article I of the U.S. Constitution
4. National Constitution Center. (n.d.). Article I, Section 5: Powers and duties of Congress. Constitution Center. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/760
5. Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution
6. Story, Joseph. Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. 3 vols. Boston, 1833. (n.d.). Article I, Section 5: Clauses 1–4. The University of Chicago Press: The Founders’ Constitution. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_5s21.html
7. United States v. Ballin, 144 U.S. 1 (1892).
8. U.S. Senate. History of the Senate. https://www.rules.senate.gov/about/history
9. Conway, M. D. (1872). Republican Superstitions as Illustrated in the Political History of America. United Kingdom: H.S. King, pg. 47-48
10. Mathur-Ashton, A. (2024, November 13). Who Is Republican John Thune, the New Senate Majority Leader?. U.S. News & World Report. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2024-11-13/who-is-republican-john-thune-the-new-senate-majority-leader
11. Congress.gov. (2025, January 22). S. 6—119th Congress (2025–2026): Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act: All actions. Library of Congress. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/6/all-actions?overview=closed#tabs
12. Senate Republican Leader. (2021, January 26). McConnell on preserving the legislative filibuster for both parties. https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcconnell-on-preserving-the-legislative-filibuster-for-both-parties
13. Doornbos, C. (2025, January 3). GOP leader John Thune vows to preserve filibuster as Republicans retake Senate. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2025/01/03/us-news/gop-leader-john-thune-vows-to-preserve-filibuster-as-republicans-retake-senate/
14. U.S. Senate. (n.d.). About filibusters and cloture: Overview. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture/overview.htm
15. Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution
16. National Constitution Center. (n.d.). Seventeenth Amendment: Interpretations (Essay 147). https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xvii/interpretations/147
17. U.S. Senate. About filibusters and cloture: Overview. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture/overview.htm
18. Martin B. Gold, Senate Procedure and Practice, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pg. 52-53
19. Martin B. Gold, Senate Procedure and Practice, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pg. 55-59
20. Associated Press. (2026, March 10). Majority Leader Thune says Senate to consider voting bill but pushes back on demands for “talking filibuster.’”; The Hill. (March 2026). GOP leader John Thune quashes Donald Trump push to reform filibuster for SAVE Act. https://apnews.com/article/trump-save-america-act-congress-voting-midterms-e4223827fff131d9b8f0afabccd56325; https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5777802-talking-filibuster-gop-debate/
21. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution
22. Center for Renewing America. (2025). Primer: Time to give the blue slip the pink slip. https://americarenewing.com/issues/primer-time-to-give-the-blue-slip-the-pink-slip/
23. McMillion, B. J. (2020). The blue slip process for U.S. circuit and district court nominations (1917–present) (CRS Report No. R44975). Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R44975/R44975.11.pdf
24. Courthouse News Service. (2025). Senate blue slip tradition intact for now as Schumer blocks Trump nominees for NY prosecutors. https://www.courthousenews.com/senate-blue-slip-tradition-intact-for-now-as-schumer-blocks-trump-nominees-for-ny-prosecutors/
25. New York Times. (2025, April 16). Schumer Moves to Block Trump Picks for Two Key Prosecutor Positions.; Courthouse News Service (2025, April 16). The nominees were Jay Clayton (Southern District of New York) and Joseph Nocella (Eastern District of New York).
26. Washington Times. (2025, July 30). Trump prods Chuck Grassley to break Senate “blue slip” tradition.; Fox News. (2025, August 31). Trump nominees squeezed between “blue slips” and blue obstruction. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jul/30/trump-prods-chuck-grassley-break-senate-blue-slip-tradition-democrats/
27. Grassley, C. (2025). Q&A: Blue slips. U.S. Senate. https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/qanda-blue-slips
28. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. (2017). Grassley to maintain historical blue slip courtesy. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/grassley-to-maintain-historical-blue-slip-courtesy
29. Grassley, C. (2017, November 29). Grassley: We are upholding blue slip courtesy of vast majority of Judiciary chairmen over past century. Senate Judiciary Committee. harettps://www.judiciary.senate.gov/grassley-we-are-upholding-blue-slip-courtesy-of-vast-majority-of-judiciary-chairman-over-past-century
30. Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution
31. Hogue, H. B., & Bearden, M. O. (2011). R42329: Recess appointments made by President Barack Obama. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42329
32. NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U.S. 513 (2014)
33. CBS News. (2007, December 19). Reid calls for pro forma sessions, clears dozens of executive appointments. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reid-calls-for-pro-forma-sessions-clears-dozens-of-executive-appointments/
34. U.S. Senate. (2025). Daily press: 2025 archive. https://www.dailypress.senate.gov/2025/
35. U.S. Senate. (2026). Daily press: 2026 archive. https://www.dailypress.senate.gov/2026/
36. Barrett, T. (2012, January 31). Senate welcomes first female parliamentarian. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2012/01/31/politics/senate-female-parliamentarian/
37. Picon, A. (2025, June 20). Parliamentarian rules against IRA, permitting provisions in megabill. E&E News by POLITICO. https://www.eenews.net/articles/parliamentarian-rules-against-ira-permitting-provisions-in-megabill/
38. Bolton, A. (2025, June 26). Tuberville, Senate parliamentarian clash over Medicaid provisions in GOP megabill. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5371057-tuberville-senate-parliamentarian-medicaid/
39. The Washington Times. (2001, May 8). Senate parliamentarian fired for his “inconsistent” rulings. Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20190819205411/https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2001/may/8/20010508-022919-1989r/
40. Newton-Small, J. (2010, March 4). Filibuster reform: Dems push for rules change in Senate. TIME. https://web.archive.org/web/20100304211926/http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1969267,00.html
41. Lucas, F. (2026, February 24). What supermajorities of likely voters in battleground states say about SAVE America Act. The Daily Signal. https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/02/24/what-supermajorities-of-likely-voters-in-battleground-states-say-about-save-america-act/
42. The Secure the Border Act (H.R. 2, 118th Congress) passed the House 219–213 in May 2023 but never received a Senate floor vote, dying against the sixty-vote cloture wall. Fragments of its enforcement architecture were later enacted through the Laken Riley Act (P.L. 119-1) and the 2025 budget-reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21).
43. Peters, J. W. (2013, November 21). Reid sets in motion steps to limit use of filibuster. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/us/politics/reid-sets-in-motion-steps-to-limit-use-of-filibuster.html
44. Touchberry, R. (2026, June 1). Retiring Senate Democrats open door to anti-filibuster successors. Washington Examiner. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/4587558/retiring-senate-democrats-open-door-to-anti-filibuster-successors/
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